Filtering Out Invalid Products

When your product catalog is uploaded to Oracle Recommendations, the expiration_date field in the Recommendations XML upload file should be mapped to the product.endDate property. Doing this enables Recommendations to recommend a product until its specified end date, but not on that date or beyond it.

In addition, you should be sure to exclude any product whose product.startDate value is in the future. Recommendations does not have a field that corresponds to startDate, but you can define a rule to exclude such products. Or you can omit these products from the upload file. If so, you need to upload new products on a regular basis as they reach their start dates. In either case, you need to update any products whose start or end dates change, to ensure they are not recommended when they are invalid (or excluded when valid).

Products displayed under the We Also Suggest label that appear on product detail pages consist of a mix of recommendations and merchandiser-defined cross-sells. To validate the cross-sells, the /browse/gadgets/relatedProducts.jsp gadget invokes /atg/store/droplet/CatalogItemFilterDroplet (of class atg.service.collections.filter.droplet.CollectionFilter). This servlet bean is configured to use the /atg/store/collections/filter/CatalogItemFilter component:

filter=/atg/store/collections/filter/CatalogItemFilter

The CatalogItemFilter component is of class atg.service.collections.filter.ValidatorFilter, which is discussed in the Filters and Validators section of the Pages and Navigation chapter. This component’s validators property is set to: